Windows 8 Appearance and Personalization – Fonts

A font is perhaps the least attention-seeking, but one of the most important factors in consuming and displaying text content.

A font decided whether your text content will look clean and beautiful or ugly and repelling. Your Windows system displays text elements in a specific font. Various applications use different fonts to emphasize various types of contents.

If you use a text-based program, then you require an eye-soothing font. In case you are a programmer, then you might have spent a day or two just to select an appropriate font for your IDE.

You can manage all the fonts present in this system through this applet.

How to Launch It

Open the traditional Control Panel through the Start Screen or using the Run Windows command “control”.

Select “Category” view for Control Panel.

Select “Appearance and Personalization” category. This opens a new page containing the subcategories.

Select “Fonts”. This will launch the applet on the same control panel page.

The main page of the applet lists all the fonts installed or detected by the system. The fonts are shown in thumbnail view by default, so that you can view their design. A font may have its own subtypes.

For example, Arial font has various subtypes like Arial Black, Arial Bold, etc. Such a font is rather called a font family, and is collected under a single icon, as shown in the above figure.

The status bar lists the following details of a selected font.

Style of the font – bold, regular, italic, etc.

Status of the font – whether it is visible or hidden to the programs.

Language for which it is designed for

Category for which it is more suitable – reading text or viewing in a display

Designer of the font

You can perform the following operations on a font.

Preview a font. This will open a window, which displays all the alphanumeric characters as well as the special characters in various font sizes.

Delete a font from the system

Hide a font – This will make the font unavailable to all the programs.

Font Settings

You can customize some basic font settings through this applet. Click on “Font Settings” located on the left pane of the main page of the applet.

This page provides you two options.

Windows can hide fonts which are not compatible with the current input language. This way, you can remove the clutter from the font lists of various applications.

Windows installs fonts on the system drive. If you are short of space in the system driver, you can place the files of a font on a different drive, and ask Windows to just install a shortcut to the font file. This way, the font doesn’t consume any space, but is still available.

Character Map

You can use this window in order to view all the characters provided by a font. Click on “Find a character” link located on the left pane of the applet’s main page. This will launch the “Character Map” window.